It’s been a long while since I’ve heard anything from Badly Drawn Boy. Mercury Prize winning The Hour of Bewilderbeast was an amazing album back in 2000, one that still holds up fairly well these days—as does his follow-up Have you Fed the Fish? Since then, there have been label troubles and friends passing away, keeping Damon Gough from more success. But Gough is back with a new album called It’s What I’m Thinking Pt. 1: Photographing Snowflakes, and, unfortunately it’s still not quite as good as his first two albums.

Gough has crafted a fairly decent batch of songs, but, unfortunately, he ruins most of them with gallons of drenching reverb and echo. Most of the songs are well-written, gorgeous bundles of simplistic British folk. Unfortunately, you can’t always tell, because Gough has overcomplicated them with effects, and his voice sounds like he’s singing either in an damp subway tunnel or an empty concert hall. His melodies are great if you can find them, but the overproduction on his voice buries them behind, for some reason, clear guitar pickings and echo wash. The production is far from stellar, to say the least.

Some of the orchestrations are a bit odd as well. Gough for some reason decided he really loved the sound of synth strings, so he slapped them into almost every song in the background. I don’t know if he’s trying to channel his inner Thom Yorke, but it doesn’t always work. He also relies pretty heavily on electronic drum beats, creating an almost Nintendo-sounding rhythm section on album stand out “Order of Things”. It doesn’t ruin the song completely, but it just follows the theme of this album being on the cusp of fantastic, but never quite crossing that border.

“Too Many Miracles” is a perfect example of one of those cusp songs. The mixing on it just sounds way off. I can forgive the epic and cinematic strings at the beginning of the song because they create a Beatles-esque feeling, but the drums are pushed too far to the back and that reverb overpowers everything. If things were equalized a little more it could be amazing. Gough’s lyrics are fantastic, as he lazily sings out lines like “There’s too many miracles happening here/It’s the same old story, different year/Oh, I’m glad you were here.” But, it’s just not quite enough.

Gough has created a solid album that has, unfortunately, been buried in poor production choices. Perhaps they were his choices. At the least, I’m sure he had some say in it, but someone else (the producer, probably) should have told him something was up. The album still has plenty to mine: “Too Many Miracles”, “A Pure Accident”, and “Order of Things” are all solid songs. It’s worth a listen, definitely, and I hope it does well. I just don’t know how many listens I can have of it before I get bored.